The word surrender is bandied about in spiritual circles as the necessary active ingredient to the growth of one’s consciousness awareness. Though I will not dispute the accuracy of what is pointed to, I do have my own take on it.
I have long had a resistance to the use of the word “surrender” when it comes to spiritual work. The inference is that there is something that one is surrendering to. If you believe in a form of a second person God – and I am well aware of Wilber’s articulation of first, second and third person pronouns and their ramifications– then that makes sense. I am not arguing against the existence of aspects of “other” – some collection of a We – that are experienceable on levels at which our depths cohabitate with “them”. I am also not disputing that the deeper one reaches into those depths, one might understandably experience the many – in some collective I/We – and view one collective of that relative singularity as divine. I do, in fact, believe that communing with all aspects of our depths is a necessary component of the growth cycle. What I am saying is that there is an experiential difference between surrendering in the form of “you know better than I so lead me” and “This moment’s focused “I” is releasing its grip on the present view to experience the more subtle – the next moment’s We”.
The first example relinquishes choice to someone or some otherness, inferring that the “I” that chooses is not responsible for its choices, which to me is never the case. This momentary I may receive intuition or insight but must then always choose to accept, alter or decline that insight based on the current relevant circumstances in which it finds itself. The current I is always the master of its choices.
I perceive the second example as recognition that some aspect of this self is stuck on one of its created “I” positions, and is “letting go” – my preferred term – in order to release its current gravitational constraints and drift upstream, where a deeper aspect of “I” peers out from its relatively longer range of waveforms. The “I” in those ranges will more clearly observe the long-range alignment or misalignment of the choices occurring in the frequency neighborhoods that “my” downstream point of focused attention is dwelling on. Surrendering my current declarations and certainties will, in essence, discharge agency of its creative intent for a while and allow attention to drift towards the natural gravity of Being.
Up and down the entire spectrum of consciousness, the experience of the many (We) and the singularity (I) will always be accessible. There is a natural flow between the two. They are, metaphorically, two sides of the same coin. It is only a matter of focus. There is, in my view, an ongoing flip-flop between collections of my variable “I/We” and the associated perspectives.
I find it amusing, sometimes, that each perspective that I flow through, at any give moment, tends to resist every other at some level. In a manner of speaking, in order to be a perspective, the boundary that identifies its distinctness must exclude otherness in order to have form. That, I think, is the source of my sometimes knee-jerk resistance to many sorts of exclusionary declarations, even though I am aware that it is built into very nature of the I/We polarity. Energetically, the very existence of the I/We interplay depends upon the natural resistance that polarities exhibit. Without that multidimensional interplay, we’d have no playground. We’d be a singularity back at the beginning planning to generate another. Some version of will “I” want to go out and play again.